The ₩ currency mark shared by both the South Korean won (KRW) and the North Korean won (KPW) — one Unicode character for two states that aren’t on speaking terms. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
The won sign (₩) is a rare kind of currency symbol: a single Unicode character — U+20A9, added back in Unicode 1.1 in 1993 — that officially stands for two separate national currencies at once. Both the South Korean won (code KRW) and the North Korean won (KPW) are written with the identical ₩ glyph, a capital “W” crossed by a horizontal stroke, even though the two governments have been divided since 1948 and their wons trade at wildly different values. The name is old: the won was introduced under the Korean Empire in 1902, replacing the yang, and it comes from the hanja 圓 (원), meaning “round” — the very same root behind Japan’s yen and China’s yuan, all three descended from the round Spanish-American silver dollar that dominated East Asian trade for generations. One symbol, two countries, and a shared etymology stretching across the region.
The mark itself: a capital W with a horizontal bar through the middle. U+20A9 is the standard sign for almost every context; the fullwidth version is a compatibility character that lines up with the fixed grid of Korean and other CJK text.
The same ₩ denotes both the South Korean won (KRW) and the North Korean won (KPW) — two currencies from two states that split in 1948 and remain, technically, at war. In Korean the unit is written 원 in Hangul. Nothing about the symbol distinguishes the two; only the three-letter currency code does.
Won, yen, and yuan are linguistic cousins — all three trace back to the character 圓 (simplified to 元 in modern China), meaning “round,” after the round silver dollars that once circulated across Asia. Japan’s yen and China’s yuan even share a single symbol, ¥, which is part of why non-native readers occasionally confuse ₩ and ¥ at a glance.
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The won’s East Asian cousin — same “round” etymology, and the ¥ glyph non-native readers sometimes mix up with ₩.
The Spanish-American silver dollar that seeded the won, yen, and yuan is also the coin most often credited with the $ sign’s own origin.